Leaving Your Marriage To ‘Do Better’ Is A Feminist Fantasy

In Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel “The Awakening,” protagonist Edna Pontellier begins to withdraw from her role as a wife and mother, cheats on her husband while he is away on business, and eventually drowns herself in the Gulf of Mexico when another prospective lover leaves her. When I first read this book as an undergraduate, I had a professor who explained how Edna’s suicide indicates her ultimate, proto-feminist empowerment: She would rather end her own life than honor the marital and maternal commitments that impede her unfettered self-actualization. Eye roll. 

But my professor was certainly right that “The Awakening” foreshadowed today’s values. The woman who abandons her commitments to “live the life she wants” remains a vaunted figure among mainstream feminists. Some notable examples include Elizabeth Gilbert of the best-selling 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” which lionizes selfishness as self-care; the late feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who glorified abortion as the path to ambition; and the popular writer Lara Bazelon, who trumpeted the personal and professional benefits of her own divorce in the pages of The New York Times.